HEARINGS before the SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON
THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE - SIXTY-NINTH CONGRESS

April 5 to 24, 1926

(Starts on page 10)

STATEMENT BY HON. WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE, A SENATOR IN THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
FROM THE STATE OF MARYLAND

Senator BRUCE. Begot by, the abuses of the old saloon, and hastened to maturity
by the economic necessities and uncalculating enthusiasm of the World War, and by the
lavish use of money and political threats by the Anti-Saloon League, national prohibition
went into

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legal effect upward of six years ago, but it can be truly said that, except to a highly
qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all. The appetite for drink,
which has been one of the primal impulses of the great mass of human beings ever since
Jesus at Cana manifested forth His glory, to use the words of St. John, by converting the
water in six water pots into wine, has, In its struggle with the vast repressive agencies
set in motion by the eighteenth amendment and the Volstead Act, furnished another
illustration of the truth, which neither moralist nor statesman should ever forget, even
in his most fervid moments of disinterested or generous feeling, that man is a creature
who can be regulated and bettered, but can not be made over. Once, during the agitation
for the abolition of human slavery, Henry Brougham decried what he termed "the wild
and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man." As wild and guilty is the
fantasy that even the power of the Federal Government can totally divest man of his warm
garment of animal sensations, desires, and appetites. Ever since the eighteenth amendment
and the Volstead Act became parts of the legislation of our land the human instinct of
personal liberty, guided by a correct sense of the limits within which natural law can be
controlled by municipal ordinances, has maintained an unbroken resistance to them; and
nothing can be more unwarranted than the statement often heard that this resistance is
limited to a single self-indulgent social class.

It is not kept up more stoutly by what the prohibitionists, vainly seek to excite
social disaffection and jealousy, call the smart social set, than it is by the members of
the American Federation of Labor. It is not limited to any social class or sect. It has
brought about close working relations between the bootlegger and thousands of the most
intelligent and virtuous members of American society who feel no more compunction about
violating the Volstead Act than the Free Soiler did about violating the fugitive slave
law, or the southern white did about nullifying ignorant negro, suffrage, the Federal
Constitution in each instance to the contrary notwithstanding And the ever mounting record
of arrests for drunkenness in all of our American cities since the enactment of the
Volstead Act indicates only too significantly that the humbler and less fortunate members
of society have their illicit purveyors of drink too. The recent utterances of Jewish
rabbis, Protestant bishops and ministers, and of Catholic prelates like Cardinals
O'Connell and Hayes, demonstrate the existence of a growing feeling, even among the
American clergy, that absolute prohibition is not the ally but the enemy of human
morality.

General Lincoln C. Andrews, the head of the Prohibition Unit, said what can not be
gainsaid when he declared last year that the bootleg industry is coextensive with our
entire national territory.

From the extent to whichprohibition monopolizes private conversation everywhere
in the United States without or within doors from the amount of space that is given to its
merits and demerits in the editorial, reportorial and news columns of our newspapers, and
from the innumerable polls that are now being taken for the purpose of testing public
opinion with respect to it, one might well imagine, at the present time, that the
eighteenth amendment and the Volstead Act, instead of having been technically in force for

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more than six years, had never passed beyond the ordinary stages of popular agitation.

The explanation of this state of things is to be found, of course, in the fact that
prohibition in the United States, under the provisions of that amendment and that act, has
proved a disastrous, tragic failure, and aside from precipitating the end of the old
saloon, which would have gone in time anyhow, with the steady increase of temperance that
was under way when the eighteenth amendment was adopted, has had no effect, on the whole,
except that of blighting human happiness, debasing human morals, and discrediting human
laws. Once there was a time when it was commonly said that whether the States or their
cities failed to enforce their penal laws or ordinances, or not, the Federal Government
never failed to enforce its penal laws; and that was true, but it is true no longer, for
the fact has been established by irrefutable proofs that during the last six years the
Federal Government, effective as may be the ordinary course of its judicial procedure, is
powerless to enforce a statute, or even a constitutional provision that attempts to make
some thing criminal at all times, and places, and under all circumstances, that is not
essentially criminal per se, and therefore has no true moral sanction back of it.

The vast majority of the people in the United States can use spirits, wine, or beer
without the slightest injury either to themselves or to others; indeed, with nothing but a
perfectly legitimate enhancement of the joy of agreeable and rational living, and to say
that even as to drink must be totally abolished, no matter how carefully safeguarded by
proper municipal regulations, is about as just and sensible as it would be to say that
motor cars are no longer to be used for pleasure purposes because they are often made the
instruments of lewdness, robbery, or murder; or that we are no longer to warm our hands
before a cheerful fire in a fireplace because it might escape from its confinement and
work untold havoc and ruin.

Like cancer, which, in its last stages, seems actually to thrive upon the knife,
violations of the Volstead Act may almost be said to have thriven upon the enforcement of
that act. During the first 12 months after it took effect it looked as if it might work.
The general disposition of every respectable man to obey the law, and the time that
necessarily had to elapse before the opponents of national prohibition could recover from
the dejection of defeat, the arts of home distillation and fermentation could be acquired
and the establishment of a vast trans- and cis-Atlantic organization for the illicit
distribution of drink could be perfected, all conspired to produce that result. But in an
incredibly short period an entire underworld for the manufacture, sale, and distribution
of drink was called into being, and with the patronage of the inextinguishable human want
that it was created to serve has baffled every effort to subdue it. This fact can be
convincingly illustrated by just a few figures:

Arrests for violations of the national
prohibition act made by Federal prohibition officers since the effective date of that act

Jan. 17 to June 30, 1920

10,548

1921

34,175

1922

42,228

1923

66,936

1924

68,161

1925

62,747

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Convictions under the national prohibition act in
the Federal courts

1920

4,315

1921

17,962

1922

22,749

1923

34,069

1924

37,181

1925

38,498

July 1 to Dec. 31, 1925

*21,274

*Or at the rate of 42,548 for a full year.

The above summaries, it will be observed, do not include arrests and convictions by State
authority for prohibition offenses.

Seizures of illicit distilleries, stills, still
worms, and fermenters

1920 (stills only)

14, 337

1921

95,933

1922

111,155

1923

158,132

1924

159,176

1925

172,537

It may be added that 70 per cent of these illicit plants and agencies were seized in
the conventionally dry States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

Commitments to Federal penitentiaries and State institutions for
care of Federal prisoners for violations of the Volstead Act

1923

97

1924

105

1925

773

This table does not include the great number of convicts committed to local prisons for
short periods.

In his report for 1925, the Attorney General states that out of 8,039 civil cases begun in
the district courts of the United States, 7,271, or 90.4 per cent, were brought under the
Volstead act, and that of the 58,128 criminal cases begun in those courts, 50,743, or 87.2
per cent, were brought under that act.

What the burden of enforcing the Volstead Act, since its enactment, has been to the
Federal district courts, may be inferred from certain letters, written by the judges of
some of those courts, to Senator McKellar of Tennessee, during March of the present year,
and published in the Congressional Record of March 13, 1926.

Senator WALSH. Pardon me, Senator, I must leave for a few minutes.

Senator BRUCE. Yes. I have not got any hope of convincing you anyhow.

In one of these letters, the Hon. George W. McClintick, the Federal judge for the
southern district of West Virginia, says that during his four years and a half of service,
he had had before him about eight thousand persons charged with crime, of which about 80
per cent were for liquor violations.

In another letter, the Hon. C. M. Hicks, the Federal judge for the eastern district of
Tennessee, states that about 90 per cent of the criminal cases that he had handled since
his appointment in March, 1923, were prohibition cases.

In another letter, the Hon. Morris A. Soper, the Federal judge for the district of
Maryland, states that in his district at least one-half the time of one judge could be
continuously employed in the trial of liquor cases, and that a bill was then pending in
Congress, authorizing

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the appointment of 10 additional district judges, one of whom would be appointed for the
district of Maryland. The district of Maryland is justly entitled to this judge, for while
only 409 persons were convicted of violations of the Volstead Act in Maryland in 1922, in
the year ending June 30, 1925, the number was 1,065.

In another letter, the Hon. John B. Sanborn, the Federal judge for the district of
Minnesota, says that in his opinion, if he had to try in his court all of the violators of
the national prohibition act who were apprehended in the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul,
and Duluth, as well as in the country districts, they would have to go out of business as
a civil court altogether and devote themselves entirely to that work.

On February 15, 1925, Judge John F. McGee, a Federal judge for the district of
Minnesota, committed suicide,leaving a statement on his desk which read as
follows:

The fact is that the United States district court has become a police court for the
trial of whisky and narcotic cases which the State courts should look after. These cases
occupy 80 per cent of the court's time and are exciting and trying on the nerves, with the
end not in sight. I started, in March, 1923, to rush that branch of litigation, and
thought I would end it, but it has ended me.

Before the enactment of the Lever Art on August 10, 1917, which forbade the manufacture
of whisky for beverage purposes, the entire number of licensed distilleries in the United
States was 507; and during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1919, the last year when the
production of beer for such purposes was permitted, the entire number of breweries in
operation was 669. Under preprohibition conditions, there were practically no illicit
plants except in certain secluded communities. During the fiscal year ending June 30, 1925
as we have seen, 172,537 illicit distilleries, stills, still worms, and fermenters were
seized by the National Prohibition Unit, to say nothing of the vast amount of subsidiary
property which was seized with them.

The same story of irrepressible law violation is disclosed by the record of arrests for
drunkenness in the leading cities of the United States since the enactment of the Volstead
Act. On the whole, the trend of these arrests has been steadily upward, with only such
fluctuations as have been produced now and then by spasms of law enforcement, inspired by
especially aggravated conditions. This will be shown by the following table:

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Arrests for drunkenness in some of the leading
cities of the United States

1920

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

Boston

21,800

30,987

37,543

38,988

39,528

37,944

Providence

2,567

3,778

4,830

5,127

4,819

4,197

New York

5,936

6,237

8,578

10,643

13,988

12,917

Buffalo

7,421

8,347

8,868

12,181

11,135

16,174

Newark

1,310

1,252

1,198

2,541

3,477

2,615

Philadelphia

14,313

21.850

26,299

45,226

55,766

58,617

Pittsburgh

9,577

10,371

16,554

24,651

25,401

28,568

Wilmington, Del.

295

498

577

707

1,003

1,011

Baltimore

1,785

3,258

4,955

6,235

6,029

5,887

Washington

5,415

6,375

8,368

8,128

10,854

11,168

Richmond

1,563

1,953

2,752

2,959

2,826

2,596

Wilmington, N.C.

145

191

179

223

303

220

Charleston, S.C.

508

512

564

582

732

775

Jacksonville

811

995

1,543

2,348

2,251

2,900

Atlanta

4,199

4,491

6,553

7,003

7,972

7,557

Birmingham

927

1,117

2,000

3,652

3,972

4,962

Vicksburg

42

63

106

137

105

321

New Orleans

2,399

7,079

12,511

10,173

12,788

14,171

Galveston

241

694

905

1,108

1,391

1,259

Little Rock

511

853

819

644

771

695

St. Louis

1,861

993

1,930

2,376

2,551

5,092

Louisville

1,016

2,495

2,018

3,812

4,748

5,229

Knoxville

------

------

2,753

------

4,456

3,862

Cleveland

2,991

5,156

16,817

18,814

19,271

23,393

Cincinnati

395

603

712

1,118

1,895

2.279

Chicago

32,362

49,762

64,853

75,900

86 072

92,888

Detroit

6,599

7,220

10,098

11,947

13,717

15,124

Minneapolis

2,363

5,243

7,268

7,289

7,676

7,435

Milwaukee

516

754

2,514

3,789

------

6,056

Omaha

2,640

3,821

5,242

4,817

4,480

5,142

Des Moines

1,364

1,949

3,533

4,489

3,032

2,395

Seattle

5,753

5,797

7,066

7,974

6,756

6,377

Portland

2,476

2,904

3,761

3,099

3,922

3,613

Los Angeles

3,357

6,559

9,910

12,839

10,660

11,290

San Francisco

1,814

3,847

7,261

7,738

7,953

8,069

Salt Lake City

659

658

768

868

919

1,086

* Merged in disorderly conduct cases.

Every one of those cities show the same pronounced increase in arrests for drunkenness
between 1921 and 1925. There is nothing local, there is nothing sectional, there is
nothing regional about the phenomenon. That increase is manifest north, south, east, and
west. In not a few of the 32 cities, north, south, east, and west, that I have tabulated,
the number of arrests for drunkenness last year were even in excess of the number of
arrests for drunkenness in 1916, before the enactment of the Lever Act, the first Federal
prohibitory act.

The claim has been made that this record of arrests for drunkenness is misleading,
because since the enactment of the Volstead Act police officers are quicker to arrest
persons under the influence of liquor than they were before that time. This is certainly
not so in Baltimore, the city with which I am most familiar, because the standing
instructions of our police commissioner as to the degree of intoxication that justifies
arrest are the same as those that obtained before the passage of the Volstead Act, and
there is every reason, besides, to believe that Baltimore city policemen share the
hostility to prohibition which is entertained by the great majority of the people of
Baltimore. Even if different conditions exist in other cities, it should be borne in mind
that, at the present time, drunkenness is not so visible to the policeman, however alert
to arrest, as it was when drink addicts did not get drunk on bootleg liquor or home brew
in the home, but on liquor at the corner saloon.

Even if arrests for drunkenness were not so numerous in our cities and towns generally
in 1925 as they were in 1916, surely that fact is one which should not afford the
prohibitionists any considerable degree of satisfaction. Puerile, indeed, not to say
despicable, would be the power of the Federal Government, if in its war upon the human
desire for drink it had exerted no contracting force whatever. It may be that the volume
of liquor drunk in the United States at the present time is not so great as it was before
the enactment of the Volstead Act; if, for no other reason, because marketed liquor of all
sorts comes much higher now than it did before that time; but the contrary view has been
urged with not a little plausibility, to say the

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least. Nor am I prepared to say that if the people of the United States were to experience
a fresh accession of fatuity, the Federal Government might not be using its Army and Navy
in police work, and by spending a hundred or so millions of dollars, wipe out the
bootlegger, as the inquisition wiped out the Protestant in Spain to the infinite material
and moral loss of that country; but there is no reason to believe that the Federal
Government would ever be willing to stretch its power to such length

Some time ago, Mr. Emory R. Buckner, the United States district attorney for the
southern district of New York, expressed the opinion that prohibition might be enforced in
the State of New York the Federal Government, with the expenditure of $15,000,000 a year,
and the aid of 1,500 enforcement agents; but from the catechism, to which he has just
subjected himself, I find that he is now of the opinion that the Federal Government can
not be induced to take the necessary steps to secure Federal enforcement of prohibition in
the State of New York, and that the State of New York, itself, is apparently unwilling to
undertake the task. Indeed a bill providing for State enforcement has just been defeated
at Albany. Like a sensible man, therefore, he has reached the conclusion that under
existing conditions, Congress should modify the Volstead Act so as to permit each State to
define what shall be deemed nonintoxicating liquor.

One thing is certain, and that is that even were the bootleggers entirely exterminated
that would simply stimulate to an unprecedented degree home distilling and wine making.
The still and the fermenter would become as common in the home as the spinning wheel once
was. Anyone who is not a hopeless dolt can, in a brief time, learn how to make palatable
liquor; and it is no unknown thing that even inmates in our prisons to be discovered
making intoxicating beverages with the simplest mechanical and vegetable means.

A few days ago General Andrews said that his program was: First, to dry up the alcohol
diversion leaks; second, to control the supply of medicinal whisky; third, to check
moonshine and reduce smuggling; and, fourth, to force those who insist on violating
prohibition laws to depend on home stills for their supply.

I am afraid that this program will leave the general but little time for, refreshing
rest or healthful recreation.

The withdrawals of denatured alcohol, which the bootlegger is so successful in
renaturing, jumped-terms of ordinary progression do not suit the case from 22,388,824 wine
gallons in 1921 to 81,808,273 in 1925. That this enormous increase in the use of
industrial alcohol found its a largely into the channels of the bootleg industry is
unquestionable. The amount that did so in 1925 is computed by Henry T. Rainey, the
well-known dry Member of the House from Illinois, at 55,000,000 proof gallons,
notwithstanding the efforts of the Federal Government to render it too poisonous and
nauseous for beverage purposes.

Diversions of denatured alcohol have, of course, been swollen by the fraudulent
diversion in one way or another of pure grain alcohol, too, and sometimes such diversions
have been accomplished by sheer robbery and violence,: as when a band of from 30 to 50
malefactors, none of whom have ever been brought to justice, recently took possession of a
warehouse at Westminster, Md., bound its custodian, and carried away in trucks about 100
barrels of whisky.

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The amount of medicinal whisky diverted in New York City alone in 1925 for beverage
purposes, through the instrumentality of false medical prescriptions, has been estimated
by Mr. Buckner at as high as 275,000 gallons.

Moonshine, instead of being made as it was before the enactment of the Volstead Act, in
a few crude, sequestered localities, is now made, as the daily discoveries of the Federal
and State prohibition forces evince, in swamps, in mountain fastnesses, in dense thickets,
on rivers, in attics, in basements, In garages, in warehouses, in office buildings, even
in caves and other underground retreats. In other words, moonshine is almost as ubiquitous
as the radiance of the moon itself.

It is stated in the last report of Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt Assistant Attorney
General, that during the Federal fiscal year 1924-25, and for a "reasonable"
period of time prior thereto, over 300 foreign vessels have been engaged from time to time
in smuggling liquor into this country. Throughout the same time illicit over and agencies
have also been transporting liquor in large quantities into it, across the Canadian and
Mexican boundary lines. By the Federal Department of Commerce the business of smuggling
liquor into this country is thought to have amounted, in 1924, to about $40,000,000 in
value; and so far as I know, there is no reason to believe that it amounted to any less
sum in the year 1925. It is true that cargoes of great value are quite frequently taken
from rum runners overhauled by the rum chasers of the Coast Guard. One valued at $100,000
was captured at New York a few days ago. Another, valued at $420,000, was captured in the
same waters in January last, but incidents of this kind have, all along, been so common
that there is little cause to think that the rum octopus will ever lack tentacles to hack.
Indeed, every time it loses one at least two seems to spring up in its place.

I see it stated in the press that as soon as General Andrews has accomplished the
objects above mentioned, he proposes to move on liquor making in the home. Indeed, he has
just set his entering wedge for this purpose in the bill that he had introduced into the
Senate last Friday by Senator Goff, of West Virginia. Of course, to be thoroughly
consistent, he must not shrink even from the task of invading the sanctuary of the
American home for the purpose of ascertaining whether a little home brew has become
actually intoxicating or not; but certainly that is likely to prove the most tyrannical
and inglorious of all the tasks that he will ever be called upon to perform. It is bad
enough for the American taxpayer to have to pay the cost of maintaining a spy de luxe at
the Mayflower Hotel, or to pay the salary of a sneak like the one in Maryland who recently
wormed himself, by what were supposed to be honorable overtures of marriage into the
confidence of a young woman for the purpose of inducing her to sell him a small amount of
bootleg liquor.

As I see it, the end of American liberty would, indeed, be in sight if an organized
system of espionage were to encompass the American home, which might not scruple even to
solicit servants to betray the confidence of their masters, or to afford one member of a
family an opportunity to wreak some festering grudge upon another.

Ever since I heard that even the home might not be spared by the enginery of the
inquisition which prohibition has established in this

18 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

country, the words of Lord Chatham, which were so familiar to our people when they were
winning the liberties that have now been so lamentably abridged, have been haunting my
memory:

The poorest man may in his is cottage bid defiance to all the force of the crown.

It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may
enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England can not enter.

It is sometimes said that the Volstead Act has not been successfully enforced because
the Federal Government has not made a thoroughly sincere effort to enforce it. This
statement is unwarranted. Never in the history of free institutions has any government
more pertinaciously, sought to carry out a policy, obnoxious to a powerful popular
sentiment, than has the Federal Government in its relations to the Volstead Act. If it has
not had its way it has been only because of the vast amount of public hostility engendered
by the artificial and impracticable nature of prohibition itself, and because of the
extent to which the fidelity of many Federal prohibition and State police officials has
succumbed to the corrupting guile of a secret and unlawful business conducted by daring
And unscrupulous men, and patronized by reputable American citizens. Such an unnatural act
is in itself an incessant incentive to faithless administration. General Andrews said last
year that the bribery of Government officials is the chief obstacle in the way of the
enforcement of the Volstead Act. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the higher
officials of the Federal Government, and the many brave and honorable subordinates in the
prohibition service, have done and that could be humanly done, under the circumstances, to
make national prohibition a success. Congress has upheld it with a degree of persistency
which has even drawn down upon its head the reproach, however unjust, of extreme
subserviency to the Anti-Saloon League.

Beginning for the year 1921, with an appropriation to the Treasury Department for the
enforcement of the national prohibition act of $6,350,000, congressional appropriations to
the same department, for the same purposes, have increased from year to year, until, for
the year 1926, they have amounted, to date, to $9,678,734.09, and, when to this amount are
allocated the shares of the total amounts now appropriated for the general expenses of the
Coast Guard and the Department of Justice, respectively, which are properly chargeable to
the cost of enforcing the Volstead Act, there is good reason to believe that the current
estimate that the enforcement of that act is costing the Federal Government at the present
time some $30,000,000 per annum, is not excessive.

Both, President Harding and President Coolidge may be said to have done all that they
could in the exercise of their executive authority to secure popular obedience to the
mandates of the act; the former even going so far as to call all the governors of the
States together at Washington for the purpose of impressing upon on them the importance of
insisting upon its clue observance; and the second, not only doing the same thing later,
but also convoking at Washington a similar gathering of some of the great industrial
leaders of the country.

As for the Supreme Court, the legality of the Volstead Act has been shielded by it from
attack with the full measure of dispassionate impartiality that to its infinite honor it
has always brought to bear upon the discharge of its high judicial duty, and surely only a
most

19 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

carping spirit could find fault with the manner in which our Federal district judges have
met the burdensome responsibilities imposed upon them by an unworkable law Which must, at
times, have sorely shaken their confidence in the wisdom of the legislative branch of the
Government.

The disastrous and scandalous results which have followed the vain effort to enforce
the Volstead Act may be briefly summarized. It has diverted into the pockets of foreign
and domestic lawbreakers a large part of the immense tax revenue of $443,839,544.98 that
the Federal Government was receiving from distilled spirits and fermented liquors in 1918,
and that could be most profitably employed today toward the payment of our national debt
and the reduction of taxation. Among the domestic lawbreakers are reasonably supposed to
be not a few millionaires. Indeed, some of them have thriven to such an extent that their
incomes have even become objects of cupidity to the Federal income tax department. That
act has also led to the expenditure in Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, the Bermudas,
and Europe of millions of dollars, which, but for it, might have circulated in the
channels of trade and commerce in the United States.

Senator REED of Missouri. Senator, have you any figures on the amount of that latter
item? The amount of money we have sent abroad for liquor?

Senator BRUCE. I have not so far as Europe is concerned, or the Bermudas, or the
Bahamas. In the very nature of things it would be very difficult to get at those.

Senator REED of Missouri. I know it would be.

Senator BRUCE. But I have a cautious estimate, made recently by a news Or writer Mr.
Gilson Gardner, in regard to Canada.

It is believed by Gilson Gardner, the well-known newspaper writer, who has made a
special study of Canadian liquor conditions, that of the total annual gross receipts of
the Quebec Liquor Commission, 40 per cent, or the sum of $16,000,000, comes out of the
purses of American visitors. It is thought that as many as 200,000 American tourists visit
Montreal and Quebec each season, and that a large, if not the greater part of these
migrants are drawn away from the United States by the liberal liquor laws of Canada.
Compute also what they spend in Canada on other things than liquor and the magnitude of
our pecuniary loss can be at least measurably calculated The Volstead Act has placed human
happiness in more than one vital particular under the irritating and harassing domination
of a sour, corrosive and narrow-minded Puritanism, which does not hesitate to avow its
enmity even to such innocent recreations as smoking and dancing. It has for the first time
brought the church deeply into politics, and helped to give point to the malignant
observation of John Randolph of Roanoke, that are so badly governed as those that are
governed by women, except those that are governed by priests. It has established a settled
commerce between the worthier and the unworthiest members of the community. It has created
an underworld almost as thoroughly organized to the respectable world above it. It is
responsible for the unprecedented phenomenon of thousands and thousands of reputable men
and women, including ministers of the law itself, living in habitual disregard of
Constitution and low. It has tended to bring

20 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

all laws, including itself, into more or less disrespect. It works the grossest
discrimination between the wealthy individual who has a supply of preprohibition liquor or
does not lack the money with which to buy from the bootlegger at bootleg prices, and the
humbler individual who has no such supply, and can not afford such prices, but it is
forbidden even to make a small amount of wine or beer under his roof for his own use. In
many instances, it has deprived the poor drunkard of the monitor, who could formerly
admonish, rebuke, or even threaten him with a straight face, but can do so no longer. It
has transferred distilling and brewing operations from the distillery and brewery to the
home, and under the very eyes of young children.

When the Volstead Act went into effect one of the vine growers of California killed
himself because the prospects for his business seemed so dark. His prophetic outlook was
poor. Since that time, the vine areas of California have been very much enlarged; and a
ton of California grapes commands a price many times as great as it did then. Last year,
before the 24th day of October, 60,449 carloads of grapes were shipped eastward from that
State, the bulk of which the California grape grower reported were intended to be
converted into "fruit juice." I say nothing of the many other sources within and
without the limits of the United States from which grapes were shipped to points in the
United States for the same purpose; nor do I say anything of the vast amount of corn,
sugar, and other materials that are used in home brewing.

A year or so ago, I went down into the Italian quarter of one of our great cities on a
warm, sultry, summer night, when the doors and windows were open, and at one point, the
atmosphere was so strongly impregnated with the odor of wine in the making that I turned
to my companion and said that a prohibition agent would not need any search warrant but
his nose in that locality.

The Volstead Act has converted the Federal Government, with its denaturing outfit of
poisons and filth, into a more monstrous Caesar Borgia than any that medieval Italy ever
knew. In other ways also, it has filled the bowels of the people with deadly concoctions.
The Metropolitan Insurance Co., which has 17,000,000 industrial policies holders, writes
me that between 1917 and 1920, the year that the Volstead Act went into effect, there was
a decided downward trend in deaths among its policyholders from alcoholism, but that since
1920 there has been an upward trend; the figure for 1925 (2.9 deaths per 100,000
policyholders) being nearly five times the figure for 1920 (0.6). In a report rendered
last year by the State Hospital Commission of the State of New York it was stated that
alcoholic insanity had trebled in that State during the five years of national
prohibition.

The Volstead Act has diminished the use of mild fermented liquors and stimulated the
use of ardent spirits. The proportion of the latter consumed by American visitors to
Canada is said to be altogether out of keeping with the amount consumed by Canadians. It
has displaced the temperate, refreshing glass of beer or wine with the fiery pocket flask.
The champions of prohibition "are obliged to admit that drinking among women is
rapidly increasing," Bishop Thomas Nicholson, Chicago, president of the Anti-Saloon
League, was reported in the press as declaring at the thirtieth annual convention of the
league at Washington in January, 1924. Who ever saw women

21 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

freely drinking cocktails before the advent of national prohibition? It has transformed
the love of adventure and excitement which, within lawful bounds, is one of the most
charming characteristics of youth in both sexes into a pit of destruction. After going
over the face of a large part of the United States, Ernest W. Mandeville, a writer in the
Outlook, says, "Women and young boys and girls of social classes that never took a
drink before prohibition are now indulging in liquors which are a menace both to their
morals and the health." To the same effect is the testimony of Police Commissioner
Richard E. Enright, of New York, and the Washington City police department.
"Inability of the prohibition law to enforce prohibition is causing an increase in
the number of young boys and girls who become intoxicated," declared Judge H. C.
Spicer of the juvenile court at Akron, Ohio, a short time ago when two boys, aged 15 and
16 years, respectively, were arraigned before him. "During the past two years,"
he added " there have been more intoxicated children brought into court than ever
before."

"The Volstead Act has settled like a blight upon the entire joyous side of human
existence," I had occasion to say quite recently, "and its acrid and intolerant
spirit, at times, by a perfectly natural process of transmigration, reappears in the
shrouded activities of the bigoted Ku Klux Klan." It has bred a spirit of hypocrisy
worthy of the saintly sinners who, we are told by Butler in his inimitable Hudibras,
"Compounded for sins they were inclined to by damning those that had no mind
to." It has fostered deceit, perfidy, espionage, and tyranny, in some of its meanest
and most hateful aspects. It has lowered the prestige of the Federal Government. It has
even led more than one sober American citizen who gave his blood or treasure freely to our
national cause, during the World War to ask whether our forefathers did not shed their
blood in the cause of American liberty at Bunker Hill and Camden in vain. It has done more
than anything else has ever been done to destroy the nice balance between State
sovereignty and the National sovereignty which the framers of the Federal Constitution
wise wisely and beneficently devised. Its infatuated devotees have not even stopped short
of petitioning the President to use the military arm of the Federal Government for the
purpose of promoting its visionary objects, and more than one peaceful and reputable
citizen, like the late Mr. Holt of Raleigh, N. C., have been shot down in cold blood by
it's agents.

Worst of all is the extent to which the Federal service has been defiled by corruption,
hatched by it, In his recent review in the New York Times of the means by which national
prohibition was achieved, Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, the general counsel of the Anti-Saloon
League, tells us that he and his fellow prohibitionists early adopted the rule of making
it safe for a candidate to be a dry, and that in prosecuting this rule, their expenses at
one time amounted to about $2,500,000 a year; a sum well calculated, it must be admitted,
to impart a sense of safety to the breast of a legislative candidate when he decided to
espouse the prohibition cause. A valuable addition to this policy of "safety
first" was the provisions of the Volstead Act which craftily bestowed upon the farmer
the exceptional privilege of setting up ferments in fruit juices without regard to the
wholly artificial standard of one-half of 1 percent which the act im-

22 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

posed upon the city beer drinker. Another valuable addition was the bait to legislative
support held out in the clause of the Volstead Act which excepted from the Federal
classified service, for the benefit of congressional place-hunters, all the field
positions in the prohibition enforcement bureau.

The result of this exception has been pithily stated by that eminent Citizen, William
Dudley Foulke, the former member of the United States Civil Service Commission, and once,
at any rate, a prohibitionist. "They secured," he said "the passage of the
law with the clause in it, and thereby made all these places the spoils of Congressmen,
many of whom unscrupulously secured the appointment of scoundrels who accepted bribes,
dishonored the service, and made the enforcement bureau what President Harding himself
called it, 'a national scandal.'" These words were written in 1923. Since that time
so many prohibition agents, including even some prohibition directors, and so many
policemen and other officers, intrusted with the duty of enforcing prohibition, have
soiled their hands with bribes, or been guilty of other gross forms of misconduct in
connection with prohibition work that if all of them were known, nothing less than what
Byron calls "the Recording Angel's black bureau" could undertake to list them
all.

The corrupt prohibition agent or policeman is just as much a part of the bootleg
industry as the bootlegger himself. Last year it took two Pullman cars to transfer to
Atlanta the convicted policemen and prohibition agents corralled in a single round-up in
Ohio. In May, 1925, a special grand jury in Morris County, N. J., was reported in the
press as returning at one time 28 indictments against county officers and others for
violations of the Volstead Act. About the same time, the Rev. Marna S. Poulson,
superintendent of the New Jersey Anti -Saloon League, was reported in the New York Times
as saying, in an address at a prohibition rally at Atlantic City, "I don't know of
anyone who can make a dollar go further than policemen and dry agents. By frugality, after
a year in the service, they acquire automobiles and diamonds."

Since the organization of the prohibition service to February 1, 1926, 875 persons have
been separated from the Prohibition Unit mostly for official faithlessness or downright
rascality. Nor does the total that I have given include delinquents not dismissed but only
allowed to resign. Neither has the Coast Guard, that nursing mother of brave and devoted
men, military as its discipline is, by any means escaped the contamination of prohibition.
Since the duty was assigned to it of preventing the smuggling of liquor from the sea into
the United States, 7 temporary warrant officers, 11 permanent enlisted men, and 25
temporary enlisted men have been convicted of yielding, in one form or another, to the
seductions of money or liquor in connection with prohibition work. I am unable to say how
many members of the force have been arrested but not convicted. On December 10, 1925, a
United Press dispatch reported that the entire crews of two Coast Guard patrol boats which
had been assigned to patrol duty off the coast of Florida had been court-martialed for
conniving with bootleggers. On March 8, 1926, a dispatch to the New York Times from
Providence, R. I., announced that Capt. Eli Sprague, who had been for 12 years the
commander of the New Shoreham (Block Island) Coast Guard station, and had shared in the

23 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

rescue of more than 500 persons, had been held for trial on two secret conspiracy
indictments. On or about February 18, 1926, the Washington Daily News reported that
Boatswain's Mate Joseph Libby, who had walked barefoot through ice and snow to obtain
succor for his comrades whom he had left unconscious from extreme cold on patrol boat 126,
had been dishonorably discharged from the Coast Guard for bootlegging.

In view of what I have said, it is not surprising that Dr. Horace Taft, head master of
the Taft School at Watertown and brother of Chief Justice Taft, should have said a few
days ago at a law-enforcement meeting at Yale, "The United States is threatened with
the rotting of her moral foundations and of her political and social structure as a direct
result of prohibition."

The Manufacturer's Record, of Baltimore, has given, with the aid of the general
prohibition propaganda, wide currency to the statement that in 1917 Judge E. H. Gary, of
the United States Steel Corporation, Frank A. Vanderlip, Thomas A. Edison, and a thousand
other leading men of affairs signed a memorial expressing the opinion that the time bad
come for the Federal Government to take steps looking to prohibition; that in 1922 the
Record addressed a letter to each of the memorialists, asking him whether he still favored
prohibition; that only 7 per cent of the replies to these letters declared in favor of
wine and beer, and that in 1925 similar letters were sent by the Record to the same
persons, and that the replies to these letters were overwhelmingly in favor of
prohibition. In other words, the Dutch had captured and were still in possession of
Holland. These statements, have been analyzed by Mr. E. C. Horst, a prominent citizen of
the State of California, and I have recently received from him a letter as follows:

The memorial is said to number

----------

1,000

The memorial is short of 1,000 by

----------

432

The memorial is signed by

----------

568

Of these 568 who signed the memorial there were only 216 who voted in the final referendum
of the Manufacturers' Record, and of those 216 only 88 were manufacturers or business men.
The remaining 122 were professional men not engaged in manufacturing or trading. The
Manufacturers' Record of 1922 published replies from 438 people, while the Manufacturers'
Record of 1925 published replies from only 215; that is to say, that 223 of the 438 people
that favored prohibition in 1922 did not reply to the editor of the Manufacturers' Record
when he asked them for dry indorsements in 1925.

To such proportions does the most pretentious bulletin ever circulated by prohibition
propagandists in support of the claim that the vast majority of the employers of the
United States are in favor of prohibition shrivel when exposed to the ray of truth. Nay,
more, moved by the wish to probe the conditions surrounding the claim of the
Manufacturers' Record to the very bottom, the Daily Commercial News, of San Francisco,
obtained signed statements from all the 844 advertisers whose names appeared in the issue
of the, Record in which only 7 per cent of the first replies received by the Record were
said to have favored wine and beer. The result of the probe is published in the issue of
the News for Wednesday, February 17, 1926, in these words:

These 844 advertisers are scattered throughout the United States. One fourth of the
total number are in the Southern States, of whom 48 per cent responded, and of these, 60
to 61 per cent replied over their signatures that they

24 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

were in favor of legalizing light wine and 2-3/4 per cent beer; and 63 to 65 per cent of
the votes state that most of their employees are in favor of legalizing beer and light
wine. In the East, Central, and Middle Atlantic States the percentages in favor of
legalizing light wine and beer are still higher.

It is confidently asserted that the extraordinary prosperity of the United States at
the present time, as reflected in abundant employment, increased savings bank deposits,
and the purchase of motor cars is referable to prohibition. At best, as I had occasion a
short time ago to say, that kind of argument is founded upon such vague premises and
fortified by such uncertain trains of reasoning as to be practically worthless. It is
hardly worth my while to deny that the recent economic condition of the United States is
not due to prohibition when there is no such thing as prohibition, or only such
prohibition as unceasingly from year to year manifests itself in expanding criminal
dockets and mounting arrests for drunkenness.

Prohibition does not exist in Canada outside of some of its maritime Provinces and
Ontario, which, however, does not lack 4.4 per cent beer. Yet the economic welfare of
Canada during the last few years, as evidenced in building and other, material activities,
is so amazing that at times the Canadian dollar has commanded a premium over our dollar.

How is the general state of things that I have pictured to be corrected? I answer by
frankly recognizing the fact that the human appetite for drink is just as natural as the
human appetite for food or reproduction; that it can be regulated but not eradicated,
except perhaps at a cost in terms of money and tyranny that modern civilization will not
long endure, by amending the Volstead Act so as to allow the use of 2.75 per cent beer;
and by amending the eighteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution in such a manner as
to authorize the Federal Government to take over the entire management and control of the
liquor traffic, so far as State local option shall permit it to be carried on at all.

This brings me to the consideration of what is known as the Quebec plan of Government
liquor control, created by the alcoholic liquor act passed by the Quebec Legislature in
February, 1921. This act provides for the appointment of five commissioners, known as the
Quebec Liquor Commission, an official body which conducts the liquor trade in the name and
for the benefit of the Quebec government. All the profits accruing from the trade fall
into the consolidated revenues of the Province. The commission is given the monopoly of
it, to the exclusion of all private interests in the Province, and spirits for beverage
purposes can be imported and retailed only through its, organization. For this purpose the
commission has established to date 90 stores, 40 of which are in the city of Montreal, and
10 in the city of Quebec, leaving 40 for the other cities of the Province. Spirits can be
bought in these stores only between 9 o'clock in the morning and 6 o'clock in the evening
on the first five week days and between 9 o'clock in the morning and 1 o'clock in the
afternoon on Saturdays. Only one bottle may be purchased at a time by any one customer;
and the liquor is delivered in sealed bottles, and must be taken away to be drunk at home.
There is no place in the Province of Quebec where spirits can legallybe bought by the
glass and drunk on the spot.

Regulations as to wine and beer are much more lenient. First, as to wines. They are
sold without limitation as to quantity in

25 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

every store of the commission where spirits can be had. Furthermore, a few stores have
been established exclusively for the sale of wines. Thirdly, a number of hotels and
restaurants are licensed to sell wine to their guests at meals. Beer may be brewed in the
Province, or shipped in under license from the commission. Brewers are allowed to sell to
grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, taverns, and clubs, licensed by the commission, for
the retail of beer.

The purpose of, these arrangements to discourage the purchase of spirits and to
encourage the purchase of wine and beer instead is manifest.

In addition to the 90 stores operated by the commission for the retail sale of wine and
spirits, there are in the Province of Quebec 489 hotels and 59 restaurants licensed to
serve wine and beer to their patrons at meals, 573 taverns licensed to retail beer to be
drunk on the premises, and 1,238 grocery stores licensed to sell beer by the bottle to
customers who are required to take it away.

The right of local option is jealously preserved Any municipality may by the action of
the majority of its voters express its wish to remain or become dry. In that event, the
commission can not grant a license within its bounds, but any person living in a dry
district can buy direct from the commission one bottle of spirits at a time and any
quantity of wine.

The greater part of the Province in area and about half of it in population is dry by
virtue of local option, and during the four years that the Quebec alcoholic liquor act has
been in force the respective importance of dry and wet territories and populations has not
been materially modified.

The total sales of the commission during the four years of its operation have exceeded
$72,000,000, of which amount some $25,800,000 has been paid to the Canadian Federal
Government in taxes. During the same period the net revenue received by the Quebec liquor
government from different sources, including sales, permits or licenses, and seizures has
been around $19,800,000; out of which sum nearly $17,500,000 has been handed over to the,
Quebec Government. Besides the commission has built up out of its revenue a working
capital and surpluses amounting in the aggregate to $2,350,000. These particulars have
been derived by me from a paper by Arthur St. Pierre in the Independent of October 10,
1925.

Even more satisfactory than the financial results have been the moral results of the
system. One of its effects has been to diminish the consumption of spirits by promoting
the consumption of wine, and thereby to help to usher in the social conditions which
Jefferson had in mind when he said:

No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine
substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to
the bane of whisky. * * * Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much
enlarged circle. Everyone in easy circumstances (as the bulk of our citizens are) will
prefer it to the poison to which they are now driven by their Government.

In 1924-25 the sales of wine by the commission exceeded its sales of spirits by 23,814
bottles; while in 1923-24, they were less by 864,960 bottles.

Another effect has been to bring about a steady decline in drunkenness. The commission
was organized on May 1, 1921. In 1920

26 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

the monthly average, for arrests for drunkenness in Montreal had exceeded 600; in 1921,
after the organization of the commission, it was a little less than 550; in 1922 it
dropped to 354; in 1923 to less than 300, and in 1924 to 243. According to a recent study
made by Mr. William P. Eno, of Washington City, in 1923, such arrests per 100,000 of
population in dry Boston were eight times what they were in wet Montreal.

Of course, the Quebec liquor plan can not be adopted by statute in the United States
because of the limitations created by the eighteenth amendment, but it could be
naturalized in this country by an amendment to that amendment, and such an amendment is
the one proposed in the bill introduced by me into the Senate, which is now before you.

As subsequently altered by me, it reads as follows:

Subject to present prohibitory provisions in the constitution of any State, and to laws
heretofore or hereafter enacted in pursuance thereof, and to all existing local option
laws in any State, so long as said provisions or laws shall respectively remain in force,
the Congress shall have the exclusive power, with such enforcement aid as may be lent it
by any State and be accepted by it, to regulate but not to prohibit or unreasonably
restrict the manufacture, sale' transportation, importation, or exportation of
intoxicating liquors, including the power to authorize any Federal agency that it may
designate for the purpose, with the aid of such private business agencies as it may be
authorized by the Congress to employ, exclusively to undertake and conduct, manage, and
control the manufacture, sale, and distribution of such liquors; but, with the approval of
a majority of the voters in any county, parish, or incorporated city or town in any State
upon which this article shall at the time be operative, at a special election held for the
purpose, the legislature of such State shall have the Power to prohibit the manufacture,
sale, or distribution of intoxicating liquors within the limits of such county, parish, or
incorporated city or town.

The Congress shall be empowered to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The character of this amendment is almost too plain to require explanation. It confers
upon Congress the power to enact a plan of liquor control which, like the Quebec plan,
would be a combination of exclusive Government management and local option. This power,
however, is expressly made subject to present prohibitory provisions in State
constitutions, and to State local option laws wherever they now exist, and to any local
option laws that the States may pass in the future. Such laws could conceivably, by local
initiative throughout the United States, be given an expansion that , with existing
systems of state-wide prohibition in the different States would make prohibition, backed
by a genuine popular support, as completely coextensive, with the entire territory of the
United States as it is now supposed to be, but so far as the liquor traffic would not be
swayed by State action, it would be controlled by the national authority under such
administrative restrictions and safeguards that the old right to ship liquor from wet
territory to dry territory, which was one of the chief abuses of the past, could be cut
down to any limits that suited the discretion of Congress.

The amendment recognizes the imperishable truth that communities are never so obedient
to the laws as when they harmonize with their own special historic backgrounds and social
customs, usages, and habits. In other words, it provides for the right of local
self-government which is the cornerstone of all true liberty. It conserves whatever is
good in existing prohibitory conditions. It would bar out the old saloon. It does not
surrender national control over

27 * * * * * THE NATIONAL PROHIBITION LAW * * * * *

the liquor traffic in local communities, except to the extent that local communities
signify at the polls their desire that it should be so surrendered, and it never
surrenders national control for the purpose of enabling any local community to say that it
will have any system of license except what Congress shall prescribe.

In other words, it has in mind as administration which would cling to all the workable
results of the long agitation for national prohibition, and yet adjust itself with easy
flexibility to all the local diversities of thought and feeling, prejudice, and
predilection, which necessarily distinguish such a vast domain as that of the United
States.

Senator MEANS. Do you wish to inquire?

Senator REED of Missouri. I do not think I have anything to ask.

Senator MEANS. Do any of the other members wish to ask? Senator Bruce, have you any
witnesses that are directly upon the question of your resolution?

Senator BRUCE. Mr. Codman and Major Stayton will take care of the presentation of our
testimony. I thought I would be followed first by Senator Edge, and then he will marshal
our testimony for us.

Senator MEANS. Very well. Let me announce that the committee will continue in session
until 1 o'clock to-day. There will be no session this afternoon beyond the hour of 1
o'clock. If there are any persons in the room who desire to leave, to avoid confusion I
wish they would depart now; if not, please remain and keep as quiet as you can, and we
will hear Senator Edge.